Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, warned in an op-ed for Deseret News that “misinformation” from America’s own mainstream media—not China, Russia, North Korea, or socialism—poses the greatest threat to the United States.
The media has escalated its anti-conservative tactics in recent years, moving from “bias to propaganda, to open deception and suppression.”
These tactics led to a distorted outcome in the 2020 presidential election, because a disturbing percentage of Americans did not know about the Biden family’s criminal enterprise.
He identified two reasons that misinformation fills social media, the mainstream media, and cable and network news: the “immediacy of content” and the worldview of elites who control the narrative.
“Content shoots at us like water through a firehose, blending bias, opinion and facts that are nearly impossible to differentiate, leaving us pinned against a wall of doubt,” Stewart wrote.
The internet and the click-based financial model has created “an urgent race” for publishers to be first to reach the eyes of media consumers.
“Big Tech and Big Media have also learned that anger is a powerful motivator to hold attention, thus distorting stories to generate a fire of addictive rage,” Stewart wrote.
The ideological agenda of the people and companies who “control the narrative see our nation, our culture and our future in a very different way than most Americans do.”
“They think our nation is so deeply flawed, so racist, oppressive, imperialistic, unfair and arrogant that it should not be defended, and in fact, needs to be torn down and fundamentally rebuilt,” Stewart wrote.
“They think that half of Americans are rubes; backward, racists, homophobic, sexists, anti-science, closed-minded religious zealots who are too dumb to know what’s good for them,” he continued.
The pride of the elites, especially following the narrative-destroying election of President Donald Trump, led them to the belief that they need to “tell us” what to believe.
“No, not just tell us—they publicly shame those who don’t fall in line until we join them or cry for mercy,” Stewart wrote.
Stewart has represented Utah’s 2nd congressional district since 2013 and served on the House Intelligence Committee during that time.
This committee assignment has let him see firsthand the pernicious nature of the news cycle—particularly in the relentless Russian collusion hoax.
“Thousands of news stories and TV interviews, hundreds of classified leaks, and Intelligence Committee hearings told the same story,” he wrote. “Yet not a word of it was true.”
Americans find themselves caught in a cycle where they are “duped” and then their “distrust grows.”
Those who perpetrate these cycles of blatant dishonesty for partisan political ends—seen in Russiagate, the Nick Sandmann affair, and the 2020 polling fraud, to name a few—are never met with repercussions.
“None of those who carried water for these lies have been held accountable,” Stewart wrote in reference to Russiagate. “Not the FBI, CIA or DOJ officials. Not the members of Congress who lied to the American people. And certainly not the press.”
Free nations can survive only with an “informed citizenry” and “collective trust.”
Stewart wrote that the institutions that Americans rely on for trustworthy information—”the FBI, CIA, DOJ and other government agencies, universities, Big Tech,” and the media—must be held accountable, but he did not describe the form that accountability should take.
“The process of rebuilding starts with acknowledging the problem, by digging deeper, by recognizing there is so much to gain by hijacking truth and very little to gain from telling the truth,” he wrote. “We must reject those who manipulate, mislead and malign.”
